more bloody ellard

Main menu

Monthly Archives: August 2017

It was nice to have a talk about subscriptions. Seems that people like to pre-pay for a particular project. We’ll think about that when we have an expensive thing in mind for which we need help. Until then we have enough resources to make first, and only then bug you for funds. We put up or shut up.

We are going to be performing in the USA in about three weeks, so any product is going to be after we get back and sleep off the lag.

Here’s one of the things that are happening. I intended to get an album called Aversion out last year, to be cover versions of classic rock songs and psychedelia. It followed the old truth that a new band, especially electronic or weird, have to make cover versions before they get any attention (we did Strange Brew). It’s about demonstrating exactly how you differ to the mainstream. Aversion was mostly finished by late 2016 but I had a really good listen, and admitted that it just had nothing to offer that hadn’t been done better before. The classics include the Residents Third Reich and Roll, and Laibach’s Let It Be – you probably have some others you could add to that list.

Aversion is not bad, it’s on the level of Strange Brew which people seemed to like. Maybe it will arrive later. Meanwhile I decided to start on Aversion 2, which is subtitled Classic Rock Simulation. In this case it’s existing rock music that’s been edited and processed to make new songs. For example I took the first bar of a very famous 60’s song and processed the individual notes to play a variety of riffs at both normal and half speed. I added bass and drums and some vocal samples that have been tuned a word at a time to sing a melody. The result is a kind of Soul R&B number akin to these weird images that Google AI spits out.

It sounds like rock but only a memory of it, or an approximation made by an algorithm. I like some rock music, and there’s no criticism implied, just some curious misrepresentation which allows me to practice some heavy psychedelic production.

Because we’ve found that people like to buy a physical object, like Blubberknife*, or Showbag, we’ve been working on a neat little package for you that also might be expanded to other titles. The theme is lab rats, experimentation, the work of Harlow on infant monkeys. My partner creates wire forms of the sort that have already appeared on Donut. She has worked hard to not only create a complex wire rat for the cover, but has so far made over 100 wire rats to go one inside each of the packages.

This mockup has the wrong art showing inside, but gives the feel of it.

The music is on a credit card USB and there’s also a stack of credit card sized artwork. We think it’s going to be light enough that postage won’t be too harsh, but as always you have to expect it’ll cost at least the materials, the postage and something to repay the eventual 200 rats that will be needed.

I’ll be posting some examples of Aversion 2 soon, but meanwhile here’s a bit of a making of.

* Does anyone have a 1982 Blubberknife in the TV set innards? We have no pictures 🙁